“A tragedy, then, is the imitation of an action
that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself; in
language with pleasurable acces­sories, each kind brought in separately
in the parts of the work; in a dramatic, not in a narrative form; with
in­cidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis
of such emotions.” (Imgram Bywater: 35).

“Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action of
high importance, complete and of some ampli­tude; in language enhanced
by distinct and varying beauties; acted not narrated; by means of pity
and fear effectuating its purgation of these emotions.” (L. J. Potts:
24).

Excepting the famous concepts of “unit of time” (or length of
tragedy) and “character’s flaw” (or hamartia), probably
there's not other concept or part in Aristotle’s Poetics as
puzzling and celebrated as the famous definition of tragedy. In
fact, from the thirty-five words used by Aristotle in his
definition, ten (especially mimesis,
spoudaios,
catharsis and phobos) are as confusing today as they
were almost a hundred years ago when the “most popular and generally
influential” translation of Aristotle’s Poetics appeared in
English: S. H. Butcher's Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine
Arts
(1895) (Gilbert: 66).[1]
It’s true, as writes Gilbert Murray in his introduction to Bywater’s
translation of the Poetics, that the English language does not
“operate with a common stock of ideas” and does not “belong to the
same period of civilization” as the Greek (Imgram Bywater: 5).
However, the problem with Aristotle’s famous definition is not in
agreeing in how to translate it, but rather how to
interpret
it. Thus, most England and American Aris­totelians agree in the
translation—in fact, many of them even use the same translation: W.
Hamilton Fyfe (1940) uses Bywater's (1909)—but it ap­pears to most
readers that they disagree in interpreting it—in other words, in
explaining what Aristotle meant by it. Consequently, Gerald F. Else,
for example, translates mimesis as imitation and spoudaios as “an
action which is serious [and] complete” (Argument: 221), as does L.
J. Potts (“imitation,” “an action of high importance.” Potts: 24),
and as does Lane Cooper (“an artistic imitation,” “an action that is
serious, complete in itself.” Cooper: 17). When they try to
explicate or interpret it, however, there seems to be a difference.
Imitation in Aristotle’s Poetics becomes “creation” (Plato
and Aris­totle: 75; Argument: 13) according to Prof. Else; “creative
imagination” and “source of power” (Potts: 10) according to Prof.
Potts; and “the copying by the poet or artist of the thing he has
imagined” (Aristotle on the Art: xxiv) according to Prof. Cooper.
With those examples, then, we could superficially come to the
con­clusion that we’ve hardly learned what Aristotle meant by
mimesis
and spoudaios. Or at least, that even the greatest
Aristotelians of the nine­teenth and twentieth centuries haven’t
agreed yet in interpreting Aris­totle’s definition.
However, studying those interpretations very close, we can con­clude
that excepting probably Prof. Cooper’s interpreta­tions, somehow
those Aristotelians agree with each other. Thus, reinterpreting
their in­terpretations, we could conclude that Aristotle meant
imitation as “creative imagination” and action—to use a
screenwriter’s language—a story purpose.
Let’s separate, then, imitation and action, and try to
explicate them sepa­rately.

Imitation.

Even though many critics and scholars assume that mimesis
was first used by Plato (i. e. in chapters 3 and 10 of the Republic),
in real­ity, as notes Prof. Else, the word was in use in Athens
before Plato used it (“Imitation in the Fifth Century”: 79).
However, the word mimesis does not mean the same, let’s say,
for the people of Athens before Plato, in Plato’s Republic
and in Aristotle’s Poetics. Prof. Else divides mimesis
before Plato into three categories: (a) “enacting a mime-like plot or
act­ing a mime-like character”; (b) “copying another person’s action
or way of doing something”; and (c) “making a replica of something
in an inani­mate material (wood, etc.),” or copying (Plato and
Aristotle: 26). Even though one many argue, as G. M. A. Grube and
Kathy Eden do, that Plato, in the Republic, means a type of
imitation in chapter 3 (3.392d: “impersonation”) and another in
chapter 10 (10.595a-608d [Grube: xviii, and Eden: 64]),
Plato’s general idea of imitation was “copying” (Plato and
Aristotle: 27; O. B. Hardison Jr: 93).
Aristotle, however, didn’t use imitation as “copying”—or
imperson­ation. Rather, he used it as (a) the “presence of the
universal in the partic­ular” (Hardison: 93); (b) “creative
imagination” (Potts: 10); (c) “recreation of life” (Fyfe: 2), and
(d) “the artist’s tool, equivalent to the hammer with which a
carpenter constructs his objects” (Eden: 69). As differentiates
Hardison, when we say, “That photograph is a fine like­ness of John;
it catches his character beautifully; and he should use it for the
application form,” “we are echoing the Poetics” (Hardison:
93). “Imitative works,” adds Hardison, “if they are well done,
reveal generic qualities—the presence of the universal in the
particular.” “Imitation,” writes Potts, “means producing as
accurately as possible the effect that a situation, or an
experience, or a person, would produce in its true natural form,
without the instrusion of extraneous or irrelevant acci­dents”
(Potts: 67).
In effect, those four views, at a first reading, may seem far away
from each other. However, they are not. Let’s say that, in the early
century and in a small town, for example, a woman (A) is washing by
hands her hus­band’s shirts, and a friend of her (B), who lives in
the city, pays a visit to her. B is carrying her dresses in a
clothes-horses. Suddenly, it occurs to A that if she exposes her
husband’s shirts to the sun in clothes-horses, when they dry, she
won’t have to iron or press them.
What did happen to A? She has integrated those four qualities: the
particular (A) uses the universal (ways of ironing); the process
that makes A to deduces that if B is carrying her dresses in
clothes-horses and they look “perfect” (because she took them to a
cleaner), her hus­band’s shirts will also look perfect, could be
called “creative imagina­tion”—it was A's “tool”—; what she did (or
what she thought she was doing), was a recreation of something—in
this case, the way of ironing or pressing. In other words, A is
imitating.
This is not, however, the view of the noted Aristotelian Lane
Cooper. “A painter wishes to represent a man,” Cooper writes. “The
re­sult is not a man of flesh and blood, but an ‘imitation’ of a man
in line and color on a flat surface” (The Poetics: 18). Thus,
Prof. Cooper’s view of Aristotle’s mimesis is very close to
Plato’s: mimesis (its “inner meaning”) "signifies the copying
by the poet or artist of the thing he has ima­gined.” “He does not
copy the work of another; he imi­tates or embodies the inner form or
soul of his own making in an outer medium for the senses of his
audience.” And he concludes saying that “outwardly, mime­sis means
the result of the poet’s effort... the finished work of art—Oedipus
the King of Sophocles...” (Aristotle:
xxv). According to this view, in the example used above,
mimesis wouldn’t be the process of imaging a way to avoid ironing,
but the “finished work”—the shirts which, after they dry, look like
they have been ironed.

What is Action?

Other word in the famous definition that has puzzled scholars and
critics is action.[2] According to the commentaries of most
Aris­totelians, action is (a) “a unit of life,” “a unit of
happening” (Potts: 71); (b) a “piece of life of serious interest”
(Fyfe: 14); “the process that takes place between the beginning and
the end of the play” (Hardison: 114); and “purposeful action,
striving toward a goal or a destination” (Plato and Aristotle: 104).
“ ‘action’ in Aristo­tle’s sense is not ‘activity’,” Hardison notes,
“or what the performers do on the stage, but something closer to
‘process’” (114).
Like with the word mimesis, the interpretations of those
Aris­totelians are not as far away from each other as they may seem.
It’s true, however, that at one first reading, one may deduce that
Prof. Potts, for example, was confusing plot with action;
in Prof. Fyfe’s case, one could think that he re­places a puzzling
word (action) with an equal confusing word (piece of life); and in
Prof. Hardison’s case, one may ask what the hell is the process
between the beginning and the end of a play? The true is, however,
that those interpretations are very similar to each other, and that
Prof. Else’s interpre­tation, somehow, unites Pro­fessors Potts,
Fyfe and Hardison’s interpretations.
However, to make their interpretations even clearer, let’s use the
words used nowadays by Hollywood screenwriters: story purpose.
What do we mean by story purpose? Well, in Oedipus the King,
the story pur­pose is Oedipus’s search for the killer of the king
Laius. What is, then, the action of Oedipus the King? We'll see
later. But now, how­ever, let’s say that some plays and films could
have one or more story purposes or ac­tions: Citizen Kane’s
main action, for example, is the search for the meaning of the word
Rosebud, but later on, the story purpose changes to “what will
happen to Kane?”; in Chinatown, the action or story pur­pose
changes four times: (a) to find if Mr. Mulwray was having an
af­fair; (b) to find the truth or who set up Mr. Gittes; (c) to find
out who killed Mr. Mulwray; and (d) to save Evelyn.
But let’s take Professors Potts, Fyfe, Hardison and Else’s
defini­tions. How could “a unit of happenings” be the story purpose?
Well, let's take Oedipus the King as an example. Above, we
say Oedipus's search for the killer of the king is the story purpose
of the play. That search, how­ever, doesn’t come to its end by
itself: around that quest, there are events, “happenings” (Creon
returns from Delphi, Oedipus sends for Tiresias, Oedipus’s charges
against Creon, Oedipus sends for the she­pherd, etc.) which give
unity to the play. The unity of those happen­ings is, then, the
action—the story purpose.
In Fyfe’s interpretation, the case is almost the same. Unlike Prof.
Potts, however, Prof. Fyfe stresses Aristotle’s emphasis in the
unity of plot in chapter VIII of the Poetics. “In writing his
Odyssey,” Aristotle writes in the Poetics, “he [Homer]
did not include everything that hap­pened to Odysseus (for instance,
his wound on Parnassus...)” (Potts: 28). Though Aristotle was
thinking about the plot, Fyfe integrates that view to ac­tion.
Oedipus the King, for example, is not the whole life of
Oedi­pus, but only a piece of his life—probably the most important
piece of his life. But that piece of Oedipus's life is his quest for
the killing of the king—which, as we concluded above, is the story
purpose of the play.
What process is there between the beginning and the end of a play?
Or, in other words, what process takes place between Oedipus’s
conver­sation with the priests, in the beginning of Oedipus the
King, and Oedi­pus and Creon’s dialogue at the end of it? Well,
to begin with, when Oedipus talks with the priests, he’s the king of
Thebes, trying to find a cure for the plague that has struck the
city; at the end, however, he’s blind: he is a miserable, disposed
king. Again, then, what process takes place between those two
scenes?
What take place are the events that lead and end Oedipus’s quest for
the killer of the king. Above we concluded that the story purpose of
Oedipus the King was Oedipus's quest for the killer of the king.
If we are not mistaken, then, the process mentioned by Hardison,
which takes place between the beginning and the end of the play is,
in other words, the story purpose.
We are now at Prof. Else's interpretation. What is, then, the
“purposeful action, striving toward a goal” in Oedipus the King?
As we wrote above, the play begins with Oedipus talking to the
priest—he sent his wife’s brother Creon to Delphi to learn what
Oedipus could do or say to save Thebes from the plague that has
struck it. Soon, Creon enters stage and says to Oedipus that the
Prophet’s oracle commands the city to pay the killers of Laius back.
That action, we could say, is a purposeful ac­tion: it leads to
Oedipus’ summoning the citizens of Thebes, which leads to Oedipus
asking the citizens for the name of the king Laius’s killer, which
leads to the citizens’s leader asking Oedipus to ask the prophet
Tiresias for the king’s killer, and thus every other action leads to
the next.
But what does purposeful action have to do with story purpose? Well,
story purpose is, we could take the risk of saying, the
protago­nist’s goal. What is, then, Oedipus’ goal? In the first case
(his dialogue with the priests) to find a cure for the city, but
when he is told by Creon that they need to pay the king Laius’
killer back, Oedipus needs to find the killer to “cure the city”;
when the citizens’ leader asks Oedi­pus to ask the prophet Tiresias,
Oedipus has to send for him. As we can see, what we established as
the purposeful action in Oedipus the King is also its story purpose.

Catharsis.

After “interpreting” imitation and
action, we are left with the clause which refers to the function of
tragedy or to what tragedy sup­posedly does, the catharsis
clause:[3] “...carrying to completion, through a course of events
involving pity and fear, the purification of those painful or fatal
acts...” (Argument: 221); “...with incidents arousing pity
and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions”
(Bywater: 35); “...and archives, through the representation of
pitiable and fearful incidents, the catharsis of such pitiable and
fearful incidents” (Hardison [Leon Golden's translation]: 11);
“...through pity and fear it archives the purgation (catharsis) of
such emotions” (Grube: 12).
In translating Aristotle’s definition, those four Aristotelian took
two different directions in the translation of the famous word. On
one hand, Professors Bywater and Else translated it as
purification, and on the other hand, Professors Golden[4] and
Grube as purgation or clarifica­tion.[5]
In
other words, to use Prof. Hardison’s interpretation, Professors
Bywater and Else “relate catharsis to the psychology of the
spectator” rather than to Professors Golden and Grube’s, who relate
it to “what happens in tragedy itself”—that is, they relate
“catharsis to incidents rather than to emotions” (Hardison: 116).
Let's take, then, an example which could help us the “clarify” those
two interpretations. In the Middle Age, in a country of three
cities, the president takes the major city to share it with his
wife, and he gives the second city to his daughter (A), and the
third one to his son (B). However, B thinks A’s city is better than
his city, and that his father gave him the worst city because he
preferred his sister. Thus, B hates A, and he begins building the
largest army in the coun­try—to defend himself against A, because he
thinks she hates him. Deep inside B, however, he loves his sister.
While the president is out of the coun­try, a group of soldiers of
B’s city crosses the border of the presi­dent's city, and kills a
group of citizens. A B’s spy in A’s city informs B that A received a
letter from her mother telling her about the inci­dent and that A
wrote a letter to their father. Thus it occurs to B to send his army
and seize the person who is carrying his sister’s le­tter. However,
when he reads the letter, he finds out that his sister, in the
letter, is defending him, and telling her father not to worry about
the incident in his city. Suddenly, B realizes how much A loves him,
and how much he loves her.
According to Professors Bywater and Else’s theories, the audience
feel pity for B and A because (a) they are brother and sister, and
(b) because deep inside them, they love each other, and they feel
fear for what could happen to them (i. e., a war among the three
cities). When B reads his sister's letter and realizes how much they
love each other, the public is “purged” of its fear and pity.
On the other hand, according to Prof. Hardison, pity and fear is
felt by A and B, and the realization in B that his sister loves him,
cla­rified him (the character).
What is, then, catharsis? Which translation and
interpretation best fit Aristotle’s definition? According to our
interpretation, if imitation is creative imagination and action is
story purpose or protagonist’s goal, than catharsis refers to the
psychology of the spectator: in the cited example, we, as an
audience, feel pity for A and B because they are sister and brother
and they love each other; and we feel fear for what could happen to
them. Thus, during the play, we wonder what is going to happen, and
we even wish to “push” B so he can realize how much his sister loves
him. At the end, when he does realize it, we are purged: we are
happy.
In conclusion, then, by imitation Aristotle meant what we call
to­day “creative imagination”; by action, he meant story purpose or
pro­tagonist’s goal; and by catharsis, the purgation of the pity and
fear which tragedy raises in us as an audience.

Notas

[1] Short after Prof. Butcher's translation, two “eminent
translations” appeared in English: Imgram Bywater’s
Aristotle's on the Art of Poetry (1909) and D. D.
Margoliouth’s The Poetics of Aristotle (1911).

[2] The Greek word is spoudaios, which means “action of
great magni­tude or importance,” “an action which is good,” “an
action that is seri­ous and having magnitude.” However, for many
Aristotelians it applies to the whole play, not to a particular
accident (Grube: xxi), while others argue that when Aristotle wrote
it, he was talking about character. For example, see Prof. Else’s
argument in The Argument, and Plato and Aristotle. Moreover,
if we take spoudaios, and its moral or non-moral value, we’ll
need a book to discuss it. Thus, we’ll ignore the moral or
importance issue, and deal with action, not with “action which is
good.”

[3] Actually we’re jumping “pity and fear”. We do jump those two
words, however, because even the most celebrated Aristotelians
haven’t agreed in what importance do those two words have in
Aristotle’s
Poetics. For example, Prof. Humphry House, in his lectures
on the Poetics (published in his book Aristotle's Poetics),
sees a contradiction between the mean­ing of pity and fear in
Aristotle’s Rethoric (II, 8) and the meaning of pity and fear
in the Poetics. For a discussion on the subject, see pp.
100-111. Prof. Else also makes almost the same point in The
Argument (pp. 221-232.)

[4] In his commentaries to Leon Golden’s translation, Prof.
Hardison tries to argue that Golden’s translation does not refer to
catharsis
as “purgation” (Hardison: 118), and in subsequent articles, he
expanded Golden’s “views.” However, what Prof. Hardison was trying
to do was to express his view (that catharsis “is simply an
intellectual clarification of the meaning of the tragic
happenings”), “interpreting” Prof. Golden’s translation.

[5] Other possible interpretations of other translations is
offered by Prof. Else in his book Argument. After studying a
lot of translations and interpretations, he interprets Prof.
Bernays’s interpretations which refer to purgation and purification
in the medical (relief) and the religious (lustration) terms. He
also offers the two main lines of interpretations after Prof.
Bernays: one holding the medical sense (purgation or relief of the
spirit from the emotions), and other using an ethical concept
(purification of the emotions) (The Argument: 225-227). Also,
see his clarification of interpretations in page 226 of his
Argument
and his analysis, “The Tragic Side: Peculiar Pleasure and
Catharsis,” in his book Plato and Aristotle, pp. 152-162.

WORKS CITED

Bywater, Imgram. With a preface
by Gilbert Murray. Aristotle on the Art of Poetry. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1920.

Cooper, Lane.Aristotle on the
Art of Poetry. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1947.

———. The Poetics of Aristotle: its Meaning and Influence. Ithaca,
New York: Cornell University Press, 1956.